Jamb
“…marry a pig-farmer.”
Orrin Candless heard it shoot out of the side of a photographer’s mouth. The entertainment cliques clustered by the lake and bantered the afternoon away, sipping flutes and verbally laying waste to anyone and everything in sight. Ninety-two percent of the guests were Dottie’s people, far above the sixty percent he and the caterers had anticipated. There may have been a few gatecrashers who slipped in, fitness, foodie, or fashion hopefuls, struggling to get a glimpse of Dorothy Daeger, and network with her highly visible peers. The little fish didn’t present the largest problem for Orrin, his overwhelmed security staff, or the luckless caterers raiding every cupboard to accommodate, Every player, major or minor traveled with three to seven assistants, be they PA’s, publicists, musclemen, or mules. Every one of Dottie’s guests was neutral to obsequious when they had to look Orrin in the eyes, but the moment another group swallowed up the guest, he overheard a callous reminder of his place in their world.
And this was his place. The Candless spread was the largest of its kind east of the Mississippi river (and his brother owned the largest in the West), although these guests hadn’t seen more than a fraction of it. Orrin could smile, at first, when he overheard a Gucci-fied producer struggle to find fault with the building casting a shadow over a small army of busy caterers on the eastern face. Ultimately she conceded that, as big as it was, she had expected more.
She had no idea that this was only the guest house, and that the true home she would never come near - the same one to which he would actually take Dorothy Daegar-Candless tonight - was easily five times the size of this one. It was there, several miles down the road, beyond the creek, the jagged rise and the line of pine trees, that Orrin’s closest friends and family would be allowed into his palatial estate after everyone else had gone home. It was there that he would truly carry Dorothy Daeger-Candless across the threshold, and further up to the suite, where he would set her down on a mattress crafted from the fleece and feathers of no less than eight of the creatures raised on his farms.
But first he had to make it through this staged event, a photoshoot for some magazine that would have been happy to replace his visage with that of an actually celebrity, not a practical billionaire. They were here for Dottie, plus sized model, nutritionist and celebrity chef, and they were here for her quarter-of-a-million dollar dress. He saw her laughing in the scrum of assistants, and one of her own - Marni Ploltz - separated from the pack and bore down upon him.
“Okay, we need you to get to that threshold shoot right now, Mr. Candless.” She tapped robotically into her handheld planner all the while. Orrin looked up and saw that the front steps were empty. Dottie showed no sign of moving in that direction, nor did any of the photographers. Marni must have sensed that her boss’s husband hadn’t followed her order after she ignored him, because she looked up in exasperation to repeat it. That order died in her throat, and she swallowed and composed herself. For a moment they shared a particularly intimate moment of mutual loathing.
“Ah.., I guess we can send for you when the camera crew is a bit more prepared after all.., um, I have to go work on another crisis…” Marni half saluted him and quickly turned away.
“You should take care of that,” Orrin said, making sure his voice was low enough that the assistant didn’t miss his meaning. She saluted again in growing panic and scampered off.
He wasn’t just a pig farmer, he told himself. His family had fed the country meat, cheese and grains for generations. Some of these people prided themselves on their organic eating, well, his company did organic farming, too. Exotic foods from tropical climates? He was involved in imports and preservation. Unless these people ate nothing but fish caught from the decks of their yachts, they encountered his products every meal, every day. And one of these more aggressive pests had tried to tell him that he was outside of the Candless influence, since he only ate locally grown food.
Even independent farmers use my family’s equipment and fertilizers, he wanted to tell the man, but he realized that every one of Dottie’s guests wasn’t interested in the science or the business of food. He would have welcomed intelligent criticism on those topics, but his eight percent of the guests (extended family, business associates) had mostly fled inside to avoid the snark. He would have joined them, if he could, but Dottie was here.
“Hello, beautiful…” And Orrin literally swept her off her feet, to the fright of the dress wrangler in charge of safe guarding Dolce’s investment. Dottie giggled, and some of the less jaded among the crowd smiled at this human moment. He carried her up the steps easily, to the chagrin of the more jaded that had hoped that “plus-sized” actually meant “too heavy to carry.”
The professional photographers protested, they hadn’t employed their tripods and light meters, or powdered Orrin’s forehead. But they had cameras around their necks, and pressed forward to try and make do. Someone stepped on the train as they crossed the threshold, and Orrin and Dottie lurched into the eight percent party with seventy-five percent of a quarter-of-a-million dollar dress.